Mulder's gone.
So I guess I do know why I'm sitting here all alone and drinking way fucking
too much. Any why my dick has no interest at all in getting inside a
certain blonde.
I gave him to them. And, sure, Skinner was there and they were being stupid
as usual and Mulder always did have a hard-on for aliens and getting himself
so deep in trouble that only a damned miracle could save him.
But I pretty much gave him to them and I guess he just used up his last
miracle. 'Cause I don't think he's coming back from this one.
Like his old man; I don't think he's gonna get up and walk back into my
life.
Not that he was ever really in it. Not like I wanted him to be, anyway, and
that's my own damn fault. I never told him. I never showed him. I made
myself out to be his enemy. And I never ever let him know who I really was,
let alone how I really felt. I couldn't, and not just because it was
against policy and good sense and all that jazz.
He called me a coward once and, maybe, he was right.
Hell, wasn't he always...?
I pour out another drink from the bottle I've bought and glance around the
room. A typical dimly-lit, not very clean bar in Virginia, close enough to
DC to get a few suits in who are trying their best to be overlooked. They're
in jeans and t-shirts right now, but they still are wearing their suits in
all the ways that count. Whereas, my own suit was always a disguise for me.
Guess, I've always been a leather and jeans boy. Even back in Russia, when
a pair of good American jeans on the black market went for more than the
price of your grandmother. Certainly, more than some blowjob would earn
you, down in the snow with your knees getting numb, and some big soldier
fucking your face like it was a party imperative that he finish in the
shortest possible time. 'Course, maybe it was just frostbite they were
afraid of.
At least here I never had to blow anybody. Nope, just kill em.
Just lie and cheat and steal and play both sides against the middle.
American. Russian. Alien. Human. Sometimes, even I can't keep them all
straight.
Sometimes, I don't know who I am anymore. Russian or American or something
of neither world. I'm pretty sure I'm still human, but I've had an alien
inside me and God knows what it might have left behind. What it might have
done to me while I was... suppressed? Repressed? I still don't know how I
got out of that missile silo. I don't want to remember. I'm not like
Mulder—picking at every lost memory, even at the expense of having some
wacko pseudo-scientist drill holes in your head.
I've got enough to worry about.
I've got more than enough bad memories that won't go away to want to go
digging up some more.
I've got half a bottle of vodka inside me and I'm still not fucking drunk.
I drain the last of my glass and stand and walk out the door and into the
night. It's lovely out. Warm enough to wear nothing but a t-shift and yet
with a slightly cooler breeze to keep you from sweating up a storm. I don't
take off my jacket though.
My left arm starts hurting as I stand there, as I raise my right one to flag
down a taxi. Just like Mulder, all the booze in the world can't ease that
loss. I've just gotten used to it. To the pain and the itching and
tingling and the nightmares. The ghostly sensation of waking up and feeling
it's still there and then having the memory of what actually happened to it
come crashing down so hard it's all I can do to get out of bed anymore.
Tunisia didn't help. Everyone thinks a one-armed man is fair game. Easy
prey. Another reason why it was so damn satisfying to shove the Smoker down
those stairs. I had never wanted to feel that way again; small and helpless
and on my knees before some big man rushing towards a savage orgasm. At
least, it had been sand this time rather than snow.
Though I didn't get paid for it.
Which, I suppose, makes me a victim rather than a whore. Even though I did
both in order to survive.
Always, to survive...
The back of the taxi smells like cough drops, old shoes and cigarettes—much
like my now deceased employer—and I first ask the driver to take me back to
my hotel, and then change my mind a few minutes later. Instead, I have him
take me to Hegal Place. The scene of many a crime, and the last place that
I'd waited for Mulder to come home to.
I let myself in and all is as it was. A bit cluttered, a lot dusty, with
those poor helpless fish floating around waiting for someone to remember
them. I wander from room to room, just looking at things, almost but not
quite touching them. Finally, I settle on Mulder's couch—which anyone who's
spied on him long knows is also Mulder's bed—and sit back. My arm is really
hurting now and I'm so far from drunk that the whole room seems crystal
clear despite the dim light.
Too clear.
It's nothing but sharp edges and jagged corners. And I know I shouldn't be
here. Even though it's the middle of the night, Scully or Skinner could
come dropping in. As if Mulder's lack of time sense or decorum is
contagious. Or any of a number of others still in play could break in just
as I broke in, those still working for the aliens or for the rebels I've had
little choice but to sign on with. Hell, even Marita could come by—with
that perfect blond hair and those cool blue eyes, haunted though they are
these days—and, despite our current alliance, I don't dare trust her and I
still don't want to fuck her.
Even though my cock is already half-hard and my hand is creeping seemingly
all on its own towards the fly of my jeans. My erection spills out and I
hold it in one black gloved hand. Squeezing down on familiar heat and
weight. The leather is cool and slick against it. The sensation on my cock
muffled by its impersonal touch, as if the hand belongs to someone else.
Certainly, I can imagine that. I lay my head back on Mulder's old couch and
sink down into the depression left over time by his sleeping body and
squeeze my own cock and imagine him doing the same thing. Those hazel eyes
shining up at me and that pensive look on his face, as if he were busy
cataloguing each response. Enjoying every squirm and sudden involuntary
gasp for air, the smallest sound.
I can imagine him going down on me. And not for money or out of fear. Not
to survive. But because he wanted it and he knew I wanted it and that was
all that mattered.
Just the two of us and no one else. Not the FBI and not the KGB and not the
Smoker or the unfortunately deceased Bill Mulder. Not even Dana Katherine
Scully, who would surely lock him away if she ever caught him on his knees
before me. Who had never believed him like I believed him, even before I
knew just how right he was.
Before I knew his truth.
And he would be good. Or I would be needy. Or both of those things would
be equally true and all the rest wouldn't matter. My vision narrowing down
to nothing but the man in front of me and my ears deafened by the roaring of
my own increasing pulse as I lay there all collapsed before him and he slid
me in and out of that mouth, slicking me up with his saliva, turning my cock
to steel. To a metal spike, rigid and hard and swollen-hot with stolen
blood.
His fingers cool, his mouth soothing wet. His eyes glittering. Liquid
mercury. Poisonous and magical at once.
As he devoured me. As he tortured me. Demanded of me everything.
And I would want to last. I would want it to go on forever.
Even though it hurt to stay on that edge. Feeling like I was about to die.
Like all those years since I'd left Mulder's side had been an illusion. A
bad dream, as dreadful and heart-wrenching and cruel as having my left arm
cut off.
Like I could have had this, if I'd only tried harder or said just the right
thing at the right time. That if I hadn't believed so much in the job I was
doing—in the man I thought I was—and had just chucked it all instead for the
man I wanted to be, I could have had it all.
I could have had Mulder. And Mulder could have had me.
The best of me. Instead of the worst.
His name a hoarse whisper in the dark. My own plea calling me back to
ruthless reality. My own gloved hand working my cock now so hard and fast
that it's gone far past pleasure and into pain, into blind necessity. As if
I told him the truth now, showed him just how much I needed him, he would
come back. Back from their hands or from the gates of death, whichever had
the greater claim on him.
Because he won't come back alive. I know that all too well now—too little,
too late. My "allies" have been entirely too specific. Horrific.
Merciless.
They have no mouths to cry out. No eyes to see. They are blind, deaf, and
dumb and yet know far too much.
As now, so do I.
I don't cry out either as I finally fall, the black void swallowing me up
whole. My come flooding out over leather in tiny, shockingly-spastic
surges. Each one feeling as if a splinter were being pulled out of me.
Leaving nothing but lingering soreness and an emptiness that is part and
parcel of that same void. My life these days. Bottomless. Echoing. Empty.
Not worth living.
Not worth dying.
I wipe the evidence off on my jeans—worth the price of a good half dozen
blowjobs back home—and stand up again. And the vodka finally seems to have
caught up to me, because the room is tilted all wrong now. The angles are
all skewed, and even Mulder's fish seem to have gathered in one spot behind
the glass to stare at me.
I don't think they're just hungry.
I don't think he's coming home tonight.
No matter how much I want him to. Even if I regret... everything now. Even
trying to save this damn planet and all those un-fucking-grateful people
living on it. They're not worth his loss. They're not worth my own.
They're not worth... this.
I stumble back towards the door and out and down the hall, picking up speed
as I go. Until I'm almost running. Until the night closes around me again,
black as my heart and just as unforgiving.
Because I can't say the words. I can't tell him how sorry I am. I can't
tell him... that I should have... chose differently all those years ago.
I should have chose him. No matter the cost.
Well, he's back.
From them, if not from the brink of death.
I watched from a distance as they buried him. Skinner, Scully, the whole
damn crew all wrapped up tight in their mourning black.
I've worn black for ages. For what feels like a lifetime.
They've buried him and he's not dead. Not really. I know what that's like,
too. I can only hope that Mulder's not aware of where he is and what's
happening to him. Of what they've turned him into.
Scully spilled dirt into the grave. She's really popping out now. She looks
pale and sad and hopeless and somehow more lovely because of it. Of all the
things, this is what she would choose at the last to believe. That it's all
over and Mulder's dead and there' s nothing more to be done or gained or
glimpsed. All I can say is that she doesn't seem to have much faith in her
partner. Or in all the miracles she's witnessed. Her own unborn child
being just another such example.
And that's a shame and her loss. And Mulder's cross to bear.
I don't have time for the wilfully blind. I went up to the grave after they
all left. After it had been filled in with damp earth. And I knelt down
there and took up my own handful of dirt, but didn't lay it back in the
grave. What would be the point? He's no more dead than I am.
No more alive.
But they will figure that out eventually and I'm in no hurry. I'm good at
waiting. At wanting. At being denied.
At being forced to work in the shadows. And to exist there, too.
It sucks, but I do it all the same. No matter how much I long for the
light. For this long night to end.
For him...
Skinner almost caught me.
I don't know what he would have thought if he'd come in and had seen me
holding Mulder's hand, stroking that black glove down his face. Carefully
avoiding the scars. The ones that I'd helped place there. Probably, he
would imagine that I was there to hurt him or kill him. Certainly, not to
redeem him. To breathe life—real life—back into him.
Not with a kiss. Even I'm not that forward, that sacrilegious. But with a
needle.
A kiss just as sharp as my own.
So, I spun out a tale he would believe in, one made all too easy to swallow
by his own hatred for me, and let him go right ahead and mistrust me as
usual. I made my threats and gave him an ultimatum and then walked out of
there, leaving him to his own ill graces. Leaving him to my lies. While,
all along, the truth lay in that bed and I wasn't about to let it die today.
Even if everyone else end up thinking the worst of me.
Even if Mulder himself never forgives me.
But I guess I'm not asking for that. Hell, no. What I want is worse than a
little forgiveness. Is far worse than a simple jerk-off session in the dark
on Mulder's couch.
What I want...
Is what I can never have.
Afterwards, though I should have left, I could have left, the game remained.
So I waited in my car—trying hard not to think, not to hate myself all the
more for what I'd just said and done, for the man Skinner believes me to be
as well—and was only mildly surprised to see that the big man had sent
Mulder's replacement after me. Who proved as clueless up close as he'd
always seemed from a distance.
I could never have taunted Mulder like that. Tempted him. Not and gotten
away with it. Though, at least, he made me bleed. You gotta give him that.
Though it was Mulder's specialty as well. And not just on the outside.
Still, as I drove off at the last, I found myself wishing all the more
desperately that I could be there when Mulder woke up. That my face would
be the first face he'd see and that those hazel eyes would thaw and he would
smile, really smile at me—one of those devastatingly sweet kinda shy around
the edges smiles only he had—and reach out to take my hand in his. To pull
me close. To whisper that he had known all along, but just hadn't allowed
himself to believe. Until now.
And, suddenly, I couldn't see to drive anymore and I pulled off to the side
of the road. Put my head down on the steering wheel, on the back of my one
remaining hand, and just gave myself over to it. One minute, two—my eyes
burning, my nose filling up, my chest emptying out—three minutes tops, and
then I was done. I made myself be done. Even if I had years more tears
inside me.
So now I'm back at my hotel room half-way up the sky, the city spread out in
brilliant light below me, with all the curtains drawn tight shut to block it
out, and though my eyes are still a little too red, too damned green as
well, every other article of regret has been washed away. Scrubbed away.
Gone down the drain. Just like my life.
And I don't know why I'm sitting here all alone, drinking too much. I
should be happy.
But I'm fucking miserable and nobody will ever know it and Mulder will never
believe me, let alone forgive me, let alone ever want me, and the end is
coming and no one wants to see that either.
So if I can drink myself blind, I will. If I can fuck that cool, cold hand
into mute exhaustion, I will. If I can finally go to sleep tonight without
dreaming of him once, just once...
Well, two out of three ain't bad. Isn't that what they say?
But then, what do they know?
What the fuck do they know.
Redemption
by Garnet
I don't know why I'm sitting here all alone, drinking too much. I should be
happy. I should have taken Marita back to the hotel room and fucked her,
just for old time's sake. She's looking good again these days and it's been
six long months since I've even seen a woman and, best of all, we'd just
staged the coup of all coups-the Smoker is dead, the Project all but
finished. Mulder's gone.
